The Sun talks to the trees

Lucy Skywalker says:

July 30, 2010 at 8:38 pm

Hi Tallbloke! Looking at the new study of treering data from Kola, Arctic Russia,
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2010-07/haog-sor072910.php
I’ve just done a comparison of the treering “temperature” reconstruction, with sunspot cycles.
http://a.imageshack.us/img827/2556/kolatreesvssolar.gif
Clearly there is correlation with the Hale cycle. I’d like to know if this suggests magnetic influences. ====================================================

Thanks Lucy. I’ve redone the graph with the signed sunspot number to bring out the relationship a little more clearly by overlaying a flipped copy of Jean-Pierre Desmoulins graph of SSN vs planetary alignments.

It would be interesting to compare precipitation data for the area the trees grew in too.

Regarding magnetic data, I think our friend Vukcevic may be able to help with polar data from that side of the world:
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/NFC1.htm

We would generally expect to see the sun’s influence on temperature getting stronger as the geomagnetic field weakens, which is indeed what the Siberian data on Vuk’s graph shows!

Barycentric motion, spacequakes and awkward climate questions

A nice summary article over at American thinker  starting to ask the right sorts of questions. This is progress.

The Thunder and the Firecracker
Timothy Birdnow

Recently, NASA’s THEMIS spacecraft detected a phenomenon that many astronomers had suspected; the spacequake. A spacequake happens when the Earth’s magnetic field is stretched out by the solar wind – charged particles streaming from the Sun. The magnetic field becomes attenuated, stretching out away from the direction of the solar wind. At some point the field becomes too stretched and snaps back into place, producing quite a bit of energy which goes into the atmosphere and even the Earth’s surface

Some familar names getting a mention there, including Ian WIlson, whose blog is linked left.
This blog got a quiet mention mention by climatologist Tim Ball the other day too, he silently linked it in an article he has on Canada Free Press.

The IPCC, Climate Change and Solar Sophistry
Tim Ball

There are a multitude of other astrophysical relationships causing cycles related to climate not considered by the IPCC.

Finally, there’s the relationship between sunspot and global temperature. The IPCC consistently ignore the relationship though there’s extensive literature beginning with Galileo’s observations of sunspots in 1610. Initially they said there was no explanatory mechanism. This is not a valid reason if you are doing a complete summary of climate science.

John Eggart: Layman’s guide to the greenhouse effect

John Eggert, who is currently discussing some of the more technical aspects of co2 radiative physics with Nasif Nahle on another thread, has kindly sent me some of the material he has written on the greenhouse effect. This article helps us get an overview on the issues. There is also a detailed maths and physics paper for download.

An Unsettling Look at the Settled Science of Global Warming
Part 2:  Layman’s Discussion
Copyright: John Eggert P.Eng.

Introduction
This is the second of three papers on the impact of Carbon Dioxide (CO2) on climate. The first paper is a method of determining the total impact of CO2 on climate. This paper provides an overview of that work in terms that people without a strong scientific background can understand. If you are interested in the details surrounding what is being discussed in this paper, please refer to Part 1.

Note that these papers only consider whether increasing CO2 will change climate. No assertions about current or future temperatures are made. No assertions about the possible effects of climate change are made. No assertions about other gases impacting climate are made.

What these papers describe is the engineering method of determining radiant heat absorption by CO2 in an atmosphere (that is, the greenhouse effect). They show that this effect is practically at a maximum at around 200 ppm CO2.

Gray Stevens: Planetary effects on solar activity

Our friend and regular Gray Stevens has been researching and publishing his observations and ideas on his own site at Jupiters Dance for a long time now. I’m delighted he has asked me to showcase his most recent work here, which investigates planetary harmonics and their possible correlations with solar activity. This is a huge piece of work which has taken a lot of effort and time to concieve and compile. Please show Gray your appreciation by taking time to study and digest the material, and do post your thoughts and observations.

Synodic Cycles of Jupiter and the other planets of the Solar System

Introduction

Movements of the planets and potential influences on the Solar activity cycle.

Review
The earlier work by P D Jose (1) on a 178.7 year solar activity cycle, and I Charvatova (2) regarding a 2402 year solar activity cycle, showed long term periodicity in the Sun’s movement around the Solar System Barycentre and related cold and warm climate periods. A further 4627 year period consisting of 2402 years and 2225 year periods was also considered (3). This paper is to focus on the influences that may create the 11.171 year Wolf and 22.235 year Hale cycle in solar activity as well as linking with the longer periods.

Material
Each of the planets forms a synodic cycle with Jupiter which contains the largest mass and magnetic field of all of the Solar System planets.

Each of the planets form close to a whole number of synodic cycles around their orbits with a fairly small amount of prograde or retrograde motion.. In each case we are looking at the number of synodic cycles taken to complete a whole orbit. As the synodic cycles are only an average time the variation between each cycle and thus the exactitude of each cycle is not considered here. A figure is included for each cycle to show the average difference.

Neptune and Jupiter have 13 synodic cycles taking 12.782 x 13 = 166.168 years (see diagram).
188 cycles are timed at 2403 years. 13 synodic orbits 166.168. Neptune’s orbit 164.785

Nasif Nahle nails the radiative physics of co2

Over on WUWT

Nasif Nahle says:
July 26, 2010 at 4:52 pm

Dear all…

I’d like to contribute a little on this issue.

First of all, AGW is based on false conceptions and incomplete information about the physics of heat transfer.

I don’t understand why AGW proponents take the carbon dioxide as the cause of a climate change invoking its absorptive-emissive power because, through experimentation and observation of natureal phenomena, it has been demonstrated the gas is physically incompetent for causing a warming of the atmosphere.

A brief and simple calculation of the emissive power of the carbon dioxide at its current mass fraction, taking into account the results of many experiments done by reputable scientists and engineers like Hottel, Leckner, Sarofim and many others, the total emissivity and absorptiviy of the carbon dioxide is quite insignificant.

The following formula is for calculating the total emissivity of the carbon dioxide:

ΔE = [[ζ / (10.7 + 101 ζ)] – 0.0089 ζ ^10.4] (log10 [(pH2O + pCO2) L] / (pabsL) 0) ^2.76

Considering the data obtained by many researchers on this matter, the total emissivity of the carbon dioxide is low. It is 0.0017.

This value is very important for calculating the amount of energy that the carbon dioxide absorbs and emits each second. Given the specific heat capacity of the carbon dioxide at its current density and temperature, which is of the order of ~871 J/Kg K, the carbon dioxide is not the cause of any change of the Earth’s climate.

The formula for obtaining the amount of energy transferred by radiation between two thermodynamic systems is as follows:

Φq/s = e σ (A) [(Ts^4 - Tg^4)]

For example, at an atmosphere temperature of 310.4K (27 °C), the usual temperature in Summer at my location, and a surface temperature of 340.65 K (67.5 °C) the energy emitted by the carbon dioxide is 0.403 W*s.

On the contrary, the water vapor emitts 102 W*s.

It is clear what is the main protagonist in the warming of the Earth.

Besides, the oceans, the land and the subsurface materials are the fundamental thermodynamic systems of the Earth that store energy for longer periods than the atmosphere, which, in any case, acts like a conveyor of thermal energy.

On the other hand, the main thermal energy exchange at the boundary layer surface-atmosphere is not by radiation, but by conduction. The energy absorbed by the layer of air above the surface is convected away by the air. The latter happens also with the radiation absorbed by the atmosphere.

=====================================

Executive summary for policy makers by tallbloke:

For those who boggle at equations, here’s my equivalent qualitative analysis:

The sun heats the ocean, the ocean heats the atmosphere, and the atmosphere loses heat to space while the convection of evaporated ocean water regulates the speed at which the ocean cools. That’s the big picture. Any co2 in excess of around 120 parts per million is pretty much along for the ride, because the window of opportunity it has to do anything exciting is pretty small compared to what water vapour does. Within that bigger picture, what should we estimate the scale of the radiative forcing involving the 0.039% of the atmosphere which is co2, compared to the energy flows outlined above to be?

My ‘back of an envelope’ engineering estimate is that it is somewhere between a fart in the wind and a storm in a teacup.

New de Jager paper on Solar – Planetary influence

Quantifying and specifying the solar influence on
terrestrial surface temperature
C. de Jager a, S. Duhau b, B. van Geel c

Abbreviated Abstract:

This investigation is a follow-up of a paper in which we showed that both major magnetic components
of the solar dynamo, viz. the toroidal and the poloidal ones, are correlated with average terrestrial
surface temperatures. Here, we quantify, improve and specify that result and search for their causes.

Full text available from de Jager’s personal site in accordance (I think) with Elsevier’s copyright restrictions. (eek!)

*New* Predictions! Page

Be sure to visit regularly. There won’t be any comments direct on the page, but feel free to place predictions you come across or comment on predictions here. I’ll transfer interesting ones to the Predictions! page which you can find on the top links bar or left side links bar under ‘pages’.

There are four already up there.

Biggest star ever discovered “astonishes scientists”

We seem to get a lot of astonishment from mainstream astrophysicists and cosmologists these days. Presumably because frequently, new data doesn’t fit the model well.

From the UK Guardian:

Montage-of-the-Tarantual--001 VLT telescope

Visible-light image of the Tarantula nebula (left), zoomed-in image from the Very Large Telescope (centre), and the R136 cluster in near-infrared (right) with the cluster itself lower right. Photograph: ESO/PA

Astronomers say they have discovered the most colossal star on record, in a region of space known as the Tarantula nebula in a neighbouring galaxy to our own.

The record-breaking star has a mass 265 times greater than the sun and is millions of times brighter, they said.

The discovery has astonished scientists, who thought it was impossible for stars to exceed more than 150 times the mass of the sun.

When the star was born it could have been more than twice as massive. Because it is so far away – about 165,000 light-years – it can only be seen with the use of powerful telescopes in the southern hemisphere.

Rest of the story here: Guardian story

So, why were they “Astonished”? Because the standard theory on star formation via accretion discs in a gravity dominated universe such as the Big Bang model won’t allow a star to get that big before it starts losing mass via radiative activity or blows up in a supernova event. Obviously, something else is going on.

The ‘Electric Universe’ folks say stars are formed by ‘z pinch’ events caused by unpredictable field collapses in interstellar plasma flows. The quantitative theoretical side of this is still young, but lab scale experiments and computer simulations are looking good, according to proponents such as Wallace Thornhill, Anthony Perrat, Donald E. Scott and others.

Nailing the solar activity – global temperature divergence lie

We are frequently told that the Sun can’t be responsible for late C20th warming because temperature has increased while solar activity has dropped from it’s peak in the 1950′s.

What a load of rubbish.

Solar cycle amplitudes are only part of the story. The cycles in the late C20th were short, ~10 years, and high compared to the long term average of ~40 SSN. The minima between them were short too. So although they did reduce in absolute amplitude after the ’50s, they made up for it by kicking out more energy more of the time. Last year to get a handle on this, I integrated the total sunspot areas as a running cumulative total departing from the long term average.

The Sea Surface Temperature graph from woodfortrees.org with the trend lines added shows how well the sunspot cumulative total works as a proxy for Ocean Heat Content. The SST data is smoothed over 1/3 of the solar cycle length to bring out the solar effect on SST’s. I further developed this idea  in my simple solar-planetary energy model. Looking at the flattening of the rise at cycle 19-20 (1954-1976) and from cycle 22-23 and now the low cycle 24, I would say we are just over the top of the warming curve. The slightly falling OHC data from 2003 onwards measured by ARGO would seem to back this up.

So although we have yet to understand all the mechanisms by which the Sun’s energies get transferred into Earth’s climate system, we can say that the solar data fits the temperature record better than co2 data does, over a longer period too.

Timo Niroma and Ray Tomes on solar cycle lengths and planetary alignments

Veteran solar researcher Timo Niroma  has an elegant and simple analysis on his main sunspots page which neatly shows the bi-modal nature of the solar cycle lengths using ascii art! It’s common knowledge that the average solar cycle length is just over 11 years. What isn’t so well known is that the actual solar cycle length clusters around two different periods of around 10.38 and 12 years.

In the next table I have drawn lengths of the cycles so that the “official” value gets four points, the nearest value three points, the tenths of years whose distance is 0.2 years get two points and finally one point is given at the distance of 0.3 years. This should compensate for the inaccuracy of the values. For the years 5 and 6 I have used the calibrated values, for the cycle 22 the traditional value. The tentative cycle 0 (10.2 years) is added with a “o” notation.

TABLE 3. A probability distribution of the sunspot lengths.

This Bimodal distribution has been noted by other researchers too. Ray Tomes says:

A good alignment is one where the Earth has a near zero misalignment with J-V. Starting from an assumed perfect alignment, the second J-V period gives a moderate alignment, but the fifth gives a good alignment after an interval of 3.244 years. Multiples of 5 J-V periods thereafter get progressively worse until it becomes necessary to add an extra 2 J-V periods and the alignments then get better every 5 periods. These correspond to periods of 20.76 and 24.00 years. For some unknown reason, the gravitational oscillations reach maxima at intervals of 10.38 and 12.00 years, whereas best alignments take twice as long.

I’ll keep this post short and sweet, as it gets complicated next. I’d just like the bi-modal nature of solar activity to sink in first.